I stopped caring 20 years ago this month

I was an Army Counterintelligence NCO. My team did CI/HUMINT in Iraq way back when. At the end of the year, our replacements showed up. They were National Guard linguists (not Arabic) who had been involuntarily reclassified to CI and given a three week crash course. Three of them, that is. The fourth team member, their driver, was a mechanic. Sounds great, yes? The mechanic had no security clearance. Every mission, every meeting, was at least Secret. See the problem here?

And then, on our first joint mission outside the wire (an easy one), their team lead totally freaked out and drew his pistol on me. I was a lot faster with my rifle, and talked him down. Oh, and they openly disdained our/their interpreter. Being a classified unit, our ‘terp was an American, with a Top Secret clearance. (He asked if we could take him back home with us. Unfortunately, he was on a separate contract.) That’s the quality of people we left as our replacements. (History - different time and place, had a US citizen 'terp stolen from us by an SF unit, then abandoned in-country the next day when they didn't need him any more. That guy walked over 50 miles back to the base on his own.)

What really broke me was the day a US convoy was ambushed on the highway outside the base. We could hear the shooting and explosions, and see the dust cloud raised. When I ran into the operations center to see if they knew, the officer in charge said they were listening to it on the radio, isn’t it great? I asked when they were going to send out the quick reaction force to help. He looked totally confused, and asked why would they do that? When I explained in small words that the primary purpose of the unit and the base was to support and protect friendly convoys transiting that highway, the response was, “We can’t do that. Somebody might get hurt!”

I broke that day, rather than than start shooting officers, because I had a family to take care of, and they wouldn’t appreciate me being the subject of a “60 Minutes” special report.  So I simply stopped caring.  A couple weeks later, I pissed off the base commander enough he PNG'd (Persona Non Grata) me off his base.  I spent months, as a senior NCO, with nothing to do but be a spare body on missions outside the wire.  The team sergeants were ordered to ignore me.  The best of them didn't of course.  They came to me quietly for advice.  The worst actually did ignore me, and blew mission after mission due to their incompetence.

But I no longer cared, so that was okay.  None of what we did really mattered in the long run, anyways.  There was never any attempt to actually pacify Iraq, because that's not what the politicians wanted.

And then the unintelligible (and I mean that) Nigerian lieutenant (who came to the USA by way of Russia and France), whom somebody thought would be a good idea to make a counterintelligence officer, started sexually harassing our (happily married) female NCO.  We also found out he was physically abusing detainees.  As we gathered and documented the evidence against him, one of his junior enlisted buddies (yet another bad thing) found out and snitched.  So he accused all three team leaders, the best NCOs in that platoon, of EO violations.  Of course our company commander believed a fellow officer, no matter how unintelligible, over mere enlisted pukes.  So he sent those three Staff Sergeants back home early for courts-martial.

And then the Battalion sent me home with the first wave to return.  That gave me two weeks to save those NCOs.  Since we got home the night of Christmas Eve (Thanks, Ed!), I had the space between Christmas and New Years Day to testify to the Court officers.  (It was really handy that the Court was only a few yards from our office.)  I put it all in writing, along with the written and signed reports (which the captain thought had all been destroyed) I had squirreled away.  My testimony matched the three NCO's exactly, and they were quietly released, all charges dropped, and discharged with full back (forward?) pay "for the good of the service".

The idiotic (and I mean that) lieutenant never made captain, and the captain, who already had orders for reassignment and promotion to major, had a damning letter placed in his file.  It's not great, but it wasn't nothing.

And they wondered why I resigned my non-commission.